I have a pretty wide practical streak. Although I had many impractical interests, I ensured that I got a practical education and college degree with which I could be employed immediately. Certainly, I am not alone in this, but as a young Mormon woman, it was more rare than I would have imagined.

In fact, we have a whole body of humor around young women who, we joke, attend college just to meet someone to marry. Women who go into â€œsoftâ€ majors like elementary education (disclosure: I currently teach elementary school) and, shudder, anything in the School of Family Life, are said to be seeking not an education, but a husband. And in this kind of economy, letâ€™s face it, we can throw in most majors in the humanities, social sciences, and arts, tooâ€”people graduating with these degrees are not stepping out into the welcoming arms of industry (disclosure: I was a history major/English minor with teaching degree). Sure, there are men in these impractical majors, too (and why does no one accuse them of only being after an M.R. degree?), but they KNOW they are going to have to support a family, so they probably have practical plans, like graduate school, or joining the family business, or marrying rich.

And you know what, lots of adult Mormons think it is just fine for a girl to go and get an impractical degree. Because they are going to get married. And someone else will have the responsibility of providing for them and their B.A. in sociology. The only girls who need to have actual life skills are the ones who will need to work. You know, the ugly, fat, and opinionated–those girls canâ€™t reasonably expect to be married at 21 (disclosure–I was one of those girls).

I have come to believe the very opposite to be true.

The girls who are not married may be as impractical as they wish. After all, without husband or children to worry about, they can easily live on low-paying jobs, flit off to work for a year or two or five at Disneyland Tokyo, and go for a decade or so without health insurance. No big deal. It is the married ones who should worry. The dreaded three Ds of Young Womensâ€™ lessons could knock on their door any day: death, disease, or divorce. YW around the world are routinely taught these are the reasons they should be able to support themselves. Shouldnâ€™t the married ones, the ones with mouths to feed, be the ones ready to get a job the day after their spouse leaves or is paralyzed? After all, single girls have time to go back to school, live lean on student loans, and eventually get some practical skills. It is the married mothers that donâ€™t have the luxury of moving home with mom and dad to finally get that MBA.

Let me be clear: I donâ€™t think everyone needs a graduate degree, or even an undergraduate. I just think everyone, especially those a car accident away from being a breadwinner, needs marketable skills. If you are a gifted chef, cool, get some business and marketing skills and incorporate yourself. If you need creativity, learn to cut hair. If you crave security, learn some trade skills like electricians and mechanics and plumbers have. Just donâ€™t sit home folding clothes with your Art History degree and bank on your hubbyâ€™s income. Your kids deserve better than that.

As far as careers that many women go after:
I think that any education degree combined with a specialty in something that’s sought after (ESL, special ed, math, science, etc.) can be useful. The pay’s not good, but it’s a job with benefits, and there’s usually a high demand for it. I left the education field after two years (primarily because of the low pay) but it’s a handy back-up if I can’t find work in my chosen field, and I imagine it’s useful as a back-up career for women who have to provide for a family.
Same with many medical degrees, including nursing. OK money, and usually easy to find work.
I have friends that majored in other, less marketable areas who have decent jobs, some of them related to their major, some not related. But they seem to have more trouble finding work, and the work they do find tends to be not that great.

TimJ–education is especially good for the hours. Working moms can get home pretty early in the afternoon and you don’t need to worry about daycare for kids in the summers.

Annegb–I think nursing is very safe (not to mention important), but it is a field many people would not feel comfortable in (you know, bodily fluids and all). Still, if you have the stomach for it, highly practical.

It’s true that a woman (or a man, for that matter) alone can live under conditions that you wouldn’t inflict on a spouse or children, but it is most emphatically NOT true to assume either that singles “have the luxury of moving home with mom and dad,” or that it’s possible to earn a living (no matter how meagre) AND pay for school AND run even the smallest of households without anyone else to relieve you even momentarily from any of those tasks, much less to offer a moment of emotional support — whatever in the world leads you to either of those assumptions?

Practical education is any education that isn’t mere job training. Job training goes out of date, sometimes even before you pick up your diploma. The “impractical” fields — the ones that teach you to think and reason and research and understand — even if they don’t lead directly to a steady job on the factory floor — are the ones that allow you to constantly reinvent yourself and your career, learn new things, and convince employers or clients that you are worthy of their taking a gamble on you.

If all you’ve learned is which buttons to push to make a particular computer program “go,” you might find a job pushing those buttons in the summer after you graduate, but you’ll be nearly useless soon afterward, growing more useless as each year passes.

You’re assuming, however, that the sole (or at least the principal) reason to get an education is for the career prep it gives you. I’d disagree with that analysis. At the grad level, that becomes more true, but at the undergrad, I submit, another principal purpose of education is to become a well-rounded, knowledgeable person. You mention art history–one of my best friends in law school studied art history undergrad. And she did as well as anybody in law school, but she had a body of knowledge from her undergrad that I wish I had. Of course, I loved my literature undergrad, and the four years it gave me to eschew any thought of money, especially now that, as a tax attorney, I deal almost exclusively with financial transactions.

I’m sorry, my first paragraph sounds harsher than I intended. Both of us need to realize that these ideas push buttons for those who took some path other than the one you outline, and adjust accordingly. I’m sorry for commenting before rereading.

Wow! I wonder if you would stick me into the “impractical” box. I mean, I had no idea that I was only majoring in elementary education because I only came to college because I wanted to catch a husband. Oh, but wait, I’m a convert (in college, actually) so does this whole Mormon girl college joke degree thing apply to me? Oh, but I did join the Church at 19 and I did get married at 20, so maybe it does. But I had my major before I met my husband, so maybe not?

My dh got his degree in Spanish and Art (talk about impractical)and he’s almost finished getting his Master’s in Marriage & Family Therapy. I should be sure to tell him that he needs to get some marketable skills. Actually, it would probably be very easy for me to get a teaching job and make some decent money here in TX. My dh started college on a full scholarship for art. I guess he was planning on banking on my income.

Look, I get your point, and as the YW president in my ward, I’ve encouraged the girls to consider if they would be able to support a family on the income they would make in the career they choose. That may be an issue for them because we never know what life might bring. I also tell them to pray about what they choose, because Heavenly Father knows what’s best for each of us, and that’s not the same for everyone. He may actually want some of them to major in some of those “soft” subjects. I would never joke around with them about choosing a major based on a marriage prospect. Education and marriage are two of the biggest decisions they will make in their lives.

I’m sorry to sound upset, I DO understand what you mean, and I’m sorry for not really answering the question that you asked. I’ve had people assume that I only chose my major because I wanted to get married and be a mother and I wasn’t really serious about school. I can see how they get there as I married at 20 and now have 4 kids, but it’s simply not true. And to assume that I did so because I was counting on my husband to be practical and do all the “real work” so I could sit and home and go spend “his money”–well it’s hurtful and I think that attitude really devalues the form of motherhood that I have chosen. I’ll get off my soapbox now. I have some laundry to fold.

One more thing–in the current economy, a degree in social sciences, humanities, or the arts is pretty worthless. But a law degree or an MBA from an Ivy doesn’t currently guarantee a job, either, and either of those degrees adds probably six figures of debt to the equation. (It’s worth noting that, three and two years ago, when people would have started those Ivy law degrees or MBAs, the future was brilliant.) So I would submit that it’s not a good idea to go into an education just chasing trends—there should be some passion associated with the subject matter, too, because even today’s hottest profession could be obsolete or oversubscribed tomorrow.

I agree with Ardis’ sentiments almost entirely, with my only quibble being that I don’t think that obsolete job skills are a necessary outcome from degrees that offer them. Accounting, statistics, and mathematics are examples of degrees/courses that both provide highly applicable job skills and allow for dynamic paths in the workforce, as those skills have a place in virtually every industry. Moreover, they serve as an excellent foundation for critical thinking, problem solving, and research that trains a person to adapt to new environments and scenarios. I’m sure other examples exist; those are just the first three that came to mind.

I think the conversation stops when you get to graduate school. A Masters/PhD in Marriage and Family Therapy is presumably a bit different from a terminal bachelor’s. So I think we have to limit the discussion to undergraduate education only.

Frankly, I think a BS in Management is an utter waste of time. It’s not even a business degree, even though the management grad has to take business classes. It’s certainly not an MBA. And it qualifies the recipient to do what, exactly? “Manage”? Manage what? Isn’t one of the great legacies of Nibley and Scott Adams (wow, there’s a combo!) that managers who don’t have any experience in a field suck?

I had a dual bachelor’s from BYU (they only award you one, but you get to say you have two), in a technical field and in a humanities field. I can tell you that the BS got me into a technical career and into grad school, but that frankly, BYU did a terrible job in presenting a few of the courses toward that BS (now I’m almost PhD, I can say that, and at any rate, the BYU program in question has gotten better). But I don’t “use” any of the technical skills I learned, directly. As Ardis says, some were obsolete the minute I walked across the stage.

I can tell you that the humanities/BA half of my double major has had a SIGNIFICANTLY higher impact on my career than the BS half. There’s simply no comparison. The ability to read/write/analyze is one of the most significant skills any technical careerist can have, and most new graduates in the sciences and engineering are terrible communicators. They can’t put together a technical document to save their lives. (One of the finest things BYU does is require the junior year advanced writing courses.)

It took getting a master’s in the technical field before I felt that my technical education had come up to the level of the humanities education.

I’ve had this discussion a hundred times with my father, a retired professor in the sciences at a state university who encouraged his kids to go for practical degrees. He used to say that it didn’t do any good to get a degree in English (for example), unless you could show you had a marketable skill or you were planning to go to law school (even getting a PhD in English was a waste in his eyes, given his perch in academia and where the trends were).

He’s softened much in recent years. His sons marrying wives with degrees in Art, Travel&Tourism, English, Family Living, and Computer Science — wait, a pattern has been broken here — might have something to do with that. He has at least one 9-year-old grandson who has publicly announced his intention to be a writer and is, even now, trying to figure out the best path to do that. Dad’s advice to his older grandchildren has become: An undergraduate degree is equally about educating yourself *and* the process of self-discovery to pick up some marketable skills; study what you love but you need to find a career path out of this (both the girls and the boys, and especially the girls).

Dad was always concerned about women and their studies. He felt it critical that my sister find a major in something she loved and that she could work if she chose. After he retired (partly on disability), my mother went back to work as a teacher (she’d been a teacher before they married), so that’s been an influence in his thinking.

Something else he told me always made sense, though. A lot of Church members are often critical of women studying certain fields, because they think that they’ll just waste that education being mothers (a completely insane idea, I think; I have an uncle, a doctor, who is extremely critical of women studying medicine). Dad’s take is that he’d rather have his grandchildren raised by a well-educated mother. His view was that he didn’t have any problem with a rocket-scientist SAHM (if that’s what the mother wanted to do), because then his grandchildren would have that much more of an advantage and have cooler science-fair projects. (I’m probably doing a poor job trying to represent what he was trying to say.)

As a guy I did a double major at the Y, Family Science and Psychology. My intent was to be therapist but after working a few years in the field I realized I didn’t want to listen to people whine all day. I did get married so I guess I got the MR. degree. But as I love to tease my wife with is that I did go on and got a MOM degree (Masters of Organizational Management). Today I earn my income from dead pigs – so it all worked out.

I would give the old advice, study what you love and the job will take care of itself. Not very practical, but I believe it to be true.

I met an old man once who made his living by selling pottery and ceramic sculptures which he made in kilns in his backyard. He never made very much money, he had very few possessions, he probably had no health insurance, but he managed to get by. Late in life, he married a woman who had no objection to his complete lack of desire for accomplishment. They were two of the happiest people I have ever met.

Unfortunately, I myself have never been able to shake the opinion that if I only had about 100% more income, I would be happier.

What TStevens said… study what you love enough to keep doing it. I’m one of those who got a BS Sociology (BYU, thank you) more than 20 years ago. It was an excellent foundation for parenting and serving in church and community. That education+service+cookie making (I kid you not) got me into and through law school all these years later.

While the BS Sociology by itself didn’t put dollars in the pocket or food in the fridge, it did strengthen our family, neighborhood, and community.

People are clearly mad at me, so perhaps it will help to add (and I’ll go back and make it clear in the post) that I also studied the humanities and got an education degree, so I was also one of those girls people thought were not a serious student. I currently teach elementary school (although have certifications for birth-adult education). I was not married at 21, or as a student at all, and you can pick whether it was because I was ugly, fat, or opinionated. Or all 3. But I hope it is clear that some of this is tongue in cheek.

Ardis–you are very right that not all single people have a safety net of parents with whom to live. Indeed, not all of the post can apply to all people. I do think that it would be easier to move back in with parents if you were single than if you had 3 kids, though (if you had willing parents). Or get a roommate. Some living conditions are just more flexible when there are fewer of you.

I whole-heartedly agree with this: “ones that allow you to constantly reinvent yourself and your career, learn new things, and convince employers or clients that you are worthy of their taking a gamble on you” and just want to point out that a single person might have the luxury of more time to “convince employers” or work in other capacities while they build up good will toward them than a mother in need of money to feed the family NOW. Basically speaking, I think a woman returning to work after a period of not work who has an outdated BS in Psychology could have a hard time securing a job that will cater for her family.

Sam B–true that a BA/S is often a great opportunity to widen horizons, etc. I would say that that is why so many Bachelors really don’t convert to a job without further education. No education is wasted and a mom or a law student or an accountant with a broad education is a wonderful thing. I also agree that you can’t chase trends (when I was a history undergrad, we were encouraged to go into academics and get our history PhDs to replace the retirees–I have little doubt that had I done so I would now be piecing together adjunct work and community college classes to cobble out a living) and it would be best to actually ENJOY what you do. But do it practically. For example, I have some siblings who have degrees in their passion: drama. Yet can they earn a living at that? So far, no. They could add on a teaching degree and do quite well, or do have trained in something totally unrelated to pay the bills so they can do drama in some other capacity.

HeidiAnn–I don’t think there is anything impractical about an education degree (so long as you keep up your certification while you are not working). I think you already have it all worked out, you just don’t like the way I said it. Fair enough. I am sure YOU are not like this, but I think women devalue themselves when they put themselves in a position of being unemployable or unable to support their families when need be. As queuno mentioned, having a bachelors in a field is much different from having a graduate in that same field. Most of the time, you become much more employable, as I am sure your husband is.

gst–good idea. Or enlist.

Scott B–I think mathematics is a great example. I know a woman who is an accountant and SAHM and she can pretty much work whenever she wants as much as she wants. Great field that many women don’t think of as flexible, but it certainly can be.

queuno–I think you made some important points: many fields that are impractical at the undergraduate level are much more employable with graduate degree in hand. While it is the saving grace of humanities majors everywhere that we can read and write, almost no one is looking to employ someone with a bachelors in French Cinema. I think your dad was right on: no education is wasted, and there is no risk of being an over-educated mother. It makes my heart ache when women drop out or (almost as bad) change their major to something that they can finish before hubby graduates, regardless of their interest in the field or it’s practicality.

TStevens–I always wonder how therapists can stand the whining! It must take a much better person than you or I! I already pointed out that I agree it is important to like what you do, but I am not sure I would advise anyone to “let the job take care of itself”–I say, work and MAKE a way for your passion to yield some income.

Coffinberry–I find sociology fascinating, and I can see how it would have a lot of practical applications, but few income opportunities. I’d love to hear how cookies got you through law school! Congrats!

queuno (#13), no offense to your sister-in-law, but there’s a big difference between a degree program that aspires to give a broad intellectual foundation in liberal arts without remunerative opportunities tied to training (English, for example), and a degree in total bullshit (Travel & Tourism). If my kids want to study English, Philosophy, Art, French, fine, good for them. They’d just better not tell me that they want to study “family living” or “communications.”

It wasn’t so much the whining it was the strong desire to smack people upside the head and yell “Get over yourself!” Now that I am a bit older and have had a few kids, I probably could handle it, but as a young guy in my 20’s, not so much.

Good job, ESO, at returning calm responses to some passionate reactions!

Outside of academia, and after as little as a year or two post graduation, do employers really care what your major was, as long as you have the degree? I’ve had a varied career, and I don’t remember ever being asked, or ever asking, that question. An employer’s willingness to hire is most often based on interviews and portfolios, not on identifying a college major on a resume.

In that case, the skills you learn in analyzing and writing about French cinema might just be the very skills that an employer wants in a technical writer or an in-house trainer or legal researcher. (Substitute French literature for French cinema, and that sentence is completely autobiographical.)

Good death and disability insurance is a more sure way to secure the family then hoping a wife’s academic career will be just the right thing she needs fifteen years down the road to start providing income for the family at short notice.

In graduate school I met a young professor of chemical engineering who was already becoming someone of note in the field. It was instructive to me that her undergraduate degree was in economics.

I’m a male with an MRS degree of sorts: a BS in electrical engineering with formal emphasis on magnetic resonance systems (MRI, NMR, etc). I did some MRS grad work but dropped out. So… don’t knock the MRS: the math’s intense and there are thousands of wee little parts to solder.

On the other MRS pursuit… I observed a change in how (some) single women reacted to me and my different paths:

–EE/MRS/Pre-med/MD-PhD track: You’re so smart and you’re going to be rich! (actual quotes, paraphrased)
–Teacher at school for “troubled” students: You’re so sensitive and noble; I bet you’ll be a great dad.
–History grad student: How will you support a family?

The ABA is handing out school accreditations like cheap door prizes, and with universities in financial hard times, law school deans are under more pressure than ever to inflate class sizes full of high-tuition, low expense law graduate students (face it, the profit margin on a law grad for a university is probably better than just about any other field).

And now we have most of the top major law firms firing half their associates.

End result, the market is flooded with people with law degrees looking for work. I’ve seen small law firms offering starting wages of $25,000 per year. I’ve got graduates from law school cold-calling me for paralegal work!

Law grads are a dime a dozen these days. You go into this field, you’re going to rack up 100+ thousand in debt (which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy), bust your butt against people even more motivated and intelligent than you are in a rat race to beat the grading curve, get thrown out on the curb with no real lawyer skills (they don’t really teach that at law school), maybe pass the bar exam (most schools don’t really equip you to pass the exam), and then go begging for 40K per year job offers that will be few and far between.

Don’t do it.

Unless you’re a local and your lawyer dad has great connections and a job lined up for you, don’t do it.

I agree with John Mansfield that decent insurance can be a better plan than the stay-at-home parent being ready to jump into the workforce at any given moment. But that only helps if one spouse dies or is disabled, unless someone knows about lay-off insurance.

I don’t have any particularly pratical skills if I need to go back to work (and it has been seriously discussed before, with my husband being laid off at one point and disabled at another). The plan is for me to return to school for a masters degree. We’ve spent a lot of time educating my husband and we’d be willing to do the same for me if we needed it.

Ardis–thanks! I think you are entirely correct re: undergrad minor. It becomes moot as soon as you have another degree and/or some actual work experience. For women who get married in college, however, they frequently don’t get an additional degree or a job for a long time, so when they sit down to write a resume, they have to go way back to their major/minors.

John Mansfield–insurance sure is a good idea (although so many young families skip it in the beginning and fail to go back and get it). Thanks for the illustration on different kind of undergrad; my dad was an Econ major and has never regretted it, although he makes his living as a corporate lawyer.

Edje–LOVE the reactions. Too funny! I am sure men in humanities/social sciences get that all the time.

Naismith–thanks for seconding that point. I think people should always apply broadly, not just if they have the expected background.

Seth R–thanks for the input. I think it was once thought that the legal field could absorb every hard-working Mormon who could get into law school. It is such an important point that the availability of an advanced degree does not imply an actual demand in the field.

The jobs I’d recommend to any young woman are: pharmacist, nurse, or dental hygienist (sp?). Watching my friends who have those careers, they seem perfect for the ability to find ways to set your own hours and they make a decent amount of money. I don’t think I’d ever recommend being a teacher (I have a teaching degree). If you don’t teach, your certification lapses and you have to go back to school to recertify. The pay stinks. You have good benefits and summers off, but either you have to be very frugal or you have to work in the summer to supplement income. Plus, most teachers either work quite long hours and/or they bring work home with them, so not really great for spending time with your kids when you’re home. The one caveat to my suggested careers are that it seems you have to keep your toe in the field – not working very much, but at least a few hours a month and developing a relationship with an employer who’ll let you pick and choose hours also helps immensely.

I agree with Ardis about the value of an “impractical education.” I majored in philosophy and minored in humanities, and I’ve done fine career-wise. Well, maybe not — after all, I am unemployed right now.

As someone who graduated with degrees in German and English and now works in a completely unrelated field (Networking Security), I don’t really see what you study in college as necessarily determining your field of work either (as many have already said). In fact, there isn’t really a degree that would lead you to my field of work though often employers look for someone with a Computer Science degree. My guess is that there are a number of other fields that are the same, so I see the marketable skills thing as completely separate from formal education. I say study what really interests you and also learn a marketable skill … maybe you can combine them, but if not, don’t worry.

JES–good suggestions. I would also say that people who don’t actually want to teach but enter the field for perceived benefits (the summers off is something of a myth) will be disappointed with the field, likely be unhappy, and probably an underwhelming teacher. It is practical for some, but not all.

DKL–you seem to have lots of skills acquired or developed outside of that formal education–I am guessing you will always land on your feet. Good luck.

RickFFM–thanks for your point about some jobs not having a specific path or corresponding major; I guess we should all be open to learning new skills and taking divergent paths. Again, that is great advice for people already working, harder for people who plan to take several years/decades “off.”

To answer your question, nursing and teaching seem to be the ideal jobs in my social circle (I live on the East Coast). Why? Because their schedules work well with family obligations. It saddens me to see the disrespect that worthwhile pursuits such as you mentioned are given in some cultures. Yes, I wrote worthwhile.

I have a Bachelor of Science from the School of Accountancy at Brigham Young University. I have chosen to stay home to raise my children. I help prepare tax returns for 10 weeks out of the year. My boss never went to college. My friend cuts hair occasionally. She went to hair dressing school. I pay her 2.5 times what I make for an hour’s work. Could I have made a lot more money if I had chosen to work in a large corporation or accounting firm? Of course. Would that have been more valuable to my family? I don’t think so. Yes, I am able to manage a budget (something my husband never did) and balance a checkbook, but those skills were learned in my accounting classes in high school. My point is, don’t underestimate the value of ANY type of education. It is what we choose to do with it that makes the difference.

BYU must have had a pretty crap CS program if you think that the description Ardis gave of quickly obsolete button pushing applies to it. I’ve heard BYU CS people denigrate their programs before, but I don’t think I’ve heard anyone be so harsh.

I was actually going to suggest a CS degree as a great degree for women in that you can get a job right out of college, you can find part-time work, and you can often find telecommuting work. Also, while languages come and go, if you got an actual CS education, your skills will be applicable to whatever language happens to be in vogue if you decide to leave the job market and re-enter a decade later.

gst:We still have a couple of very nice wars on, and, as a keen student of human nature, I boldly predict that we will have wars evermore. So martial skills are highly practical.

That’s a great idea… until Jesus comes!

When He restores global peace, our Redeemer will put millions of workers in war-related industries out on the streets. Do you really think it’s a good idea to pursue a career whose long-term success hinges on Jesus’ continued absence?

I think that gst’s idea is a great one, given that there will be an increase in wars and violence up until the point that Jesus arrives. One would make enough money in the meantime to last the thousand years of peace that Jesus brings.

Also, it is possible that Jesus will bring “peace through strength” and that war machine types will be working overtime through the millennium.

I think that the number one Jesus-safe career is just about anything that the food service industries have to offer. The food service industries are going to go gangbusters when Jesus comes, and food service franchises in particular will be a cinch to make you rich. The Lord will eliminate poverty, and all that extra disposable income has got to go somewhere. Imagine a Subway and a McDonalds and a Dunkin Donuts on every block everywhere in the whole world, and that might not even be enough — the Millennium is going to be awesome!

DKL–you are so cool. You would fit in so well with us liberals.
I did the best Mrs. degree ever at BYU: I married my professor, thus guaranteeing him his job (since single professors were not being retained at BYU), getting myself free tuition, and making myself look super intelligent just because I was (am) Bruce Young’s wife. If anyone doubts my intelligence, I just send them his resume.

Best industry: Recycling, especially scrap metal. Right now you could build war machines out of old cars, tools, farm equipment. Then when Jesus comes you just run your operation in reverse, converting all those tanks and bombers into tractors, etc. And we know Jesus is totally into recycling: “swords into plowshares” and all.

My wife is helping the world prepare for the millennium by getting a masters in biochemistry. She’ll already understand DNA and how to replicate people and stuff so that when we’re all sweating through that class, she can go back to learn how to make quilts. In the meantime I work as a computer programmer to support her habit. She’s in it for both the education and as a back-up in case I happen to fail (our record on car and bicycle accidents seems to reinforce this possibility). Plus she wants to do something with herself. Perhaps, if and when that time comes, she’ll discover that she likes to be home with kids. Or maybe not. In any case, as her companion I feel it’s my duty to help her be whatever she wants to be. And she supports me in the things I want to do too. That, to me, is what marriage and family are all about.

BYU must have had a pretty crap CS program if you think that the description Ardis gave of quickly obsolete button pushing applies to it. Iâ€™ve heard BYU CS people denigrate their programs before, but I donâ€™t think Iâ€™ve heard anyone be so harsh.

My comments above were that the technical skills were obsolete, and my comments were that a “few” classes were problematic.

In the early-to-mid-90s, BYU’s CS program focused entirely on programming, and programming classes are notorious for going obsolete quickly. What BYU did *extremely* well, but didn’t entirely realize it, was teach core algorithmic analysis and fundamentals very, very well. However, that wasn’t particularly what got all of the attention. Anyone who was familiar with BYU’s program at that time might recognize the names of Higgins, Campbell, Stokes, Ivie, and Cornell (there are two others I can’t name at the moment). Those were the professors who had the most value to me when I got into grad school.

To further clarify my point — I’ve often claimed that BYU’s CS is a top program, and I stand by that feeling. But the “skills” portion of their program was lacking in the mid-90s. Many of those skills were obsolete by the time I graduated. Part of it was that BYU failed to understand that there was a life for CS students outside the coding realm. I’ve heard that same complaint lodged against most undergraduate and graduate CS programs, who often fail to realize that there are uses for undergraduate and graduate CS degree outside coding/programming and academia.

Perhaps I should phrase it like this: BYU’s desire to focus on software engineering often came at the expense of it’s abilities in computer science, with a focus on science.

I still use today the lessons I learned in my compiler and OS theory and data security theory and algorithmic analysis classes. The database design classes were as good as the ones I took for my master’s. My graduate committee was *shocked* when they reviewed my undergraduate course record and saw the graduate-level experience built into it. However, those classes weren’t the ones BYU hung their hat on at the time. I learned more about software development and programming from my off-campus part-time jobs.

I have an SIL who graduated in CS several years after I did (in the early 00s). She abandoned the field entirely and went to medical school. Her review was that the CS program at that time placed its “priority” on Java programming and Java programming certification, with little regard for all of the other careers that might benefit from a deeply scientific experience in the computational process.

Again, every other CS program has these issues. Coding and programming have become less and less scientific. CS programs would do well to trumpet the science, not the computer. In my opinion.